


magical mystery tour [five things that never happened to sir miles delacourt]

by smartlike



Category: The Invisibles
Genre: 5 Things, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 14:38:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smartlike/pseuds/smartlike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being knighted is an honor, but as Miles adjusts his clothes, slides button through hole, he can't seem to make himself feel it. He spent years flouting tradition in the search for knowledge and that's changed, but it's not as if there's a round table anymore. Still, he buttons, down, one then two then three and he straightens the jacket before glancing in the mirror. It's tall and wide and seems to reflect a darkness Miles doesn't see anywhere around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	magical mystery tour [five things that never happened to sir miles delacourt]

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by kel., assistance from apaintedmaypole.
> 
> Originally posted at http://www.obsessivetendencies.net/am/

**[the fool on the hill]**

Being knighted is an honor, but as Miles adjusts his clothes, slides button through hole, he can't seem to make himself feel it. He spent years flouting tradition in the search for knowledge and that's changed, but it's not as if there's a round table anymore. Still, he buttons, down, one then two then three and he straightens the jacket before glancing in the mirror. It's tall and wide and seems to reflect a darkness Miles doesn't see anywhere around him. 

He rolls his neck, cracking it loudly and there's a sharp tug at the base of his spine, a roll of nausea in his stomach. He breathes deep, steadies himself and wrinkles his brow, worrying for just a moment before shaking his head and chuckling. Castles are full of drafts and old air. He remembers reading once about circulation and age, the dead and their germs and memories all trapped in the air-- nothing new created, nothing really ever gone. Remembering that now, he has a momentary desire to stop breathing altogether, but just chuckles again instead.

"What are you laughing about?" his daughter asks, perched on a velvet covered chair across the room.

He smiles at her, tall and graceful and brighter even than he was in his best days at Eton. She seems proud of him and her voice twinkles through the stale air. "Nothing, dear. Just that it's strange to think of myself as a knight." 

She nods, her lips twisting into a smile and looks down at the book spread on her lap, turning a page. "True, it is strange. I mean, look at these pictures. You were, what-- a beatnik?" Her voice is incredulous, unable to reconcile her father with the young man in mod clothes and beads. 

He nods and laughs with her. "I guess that's the word."

She wrinkles her nose, curious, mischievous. "So lots of free love and drugs, then?"

He shrugs, walks over and wraps his arm around her shoulder, protecting her against the chilled air and leaning in to look closer. "I didn't do drugs, you know. Everyone else was, but I never took any. Just watched them all and read all the right books."

Miles remembers those years, hovering in dark corners of occult shops and other places his father would find disgraceful, pages of spells written in languages he couldn't read, thinking he could see the future. The kind of thing you put behind you when you grow up and have a family. He shivers again and remembers his daughter, just born and perfectly innocent. Miles pats her shoulder once and steps away, turning his back to her, not hearing her next question. He pulls at a thread at the hem of his coat and watches it unravel until there's a knock at the door. 

Miles looks around the room and he thinks he's ready, ready now to go out and get his recognition for leading just the right kind of proper life. He smiles into the mirror, ushers his daughter out ahead of him, leaving the whispers and cold behind him as he hurries to the ceremony. 

  


**[your mother should know]**

Beryl laughs and Miles rolls over in the bed, looking down at her. "What?" he asks, his voice thick and slow.

"I'm not even sure what I'm doing here anymore." Her voice is high pitched and Miles wonders briefly if she's going to cry. "Does it feel like we're missing the point?" 

Miles knows these words aren't for him, that they belong to someone who isn't here anymore. He bites his lip-- stiff upper lip-- bites it until he thinks he can taste blood, but he hasn't broken the skin. He can always taste blood these days. "The point of what?"

Beryl shrugs, thin pale shoulders moving against green sheets, dark like a forest and Miles remembers things from school-- myths, Latin and Greek and enchanting goddesses who never bring anything but pain. 

"I had all these-- I shouldn't be here because." Her voice breaks and she reaches a hand up in the air and lets it float there. "I was doing things. I think they were important and I loved him." 

She doesn't know what she's talking about, her eyes are blank and Miles looks at her hand, sees the way the flesh is dripping down, slowly through the air. She's empty, like everything in his life is empty, upside down and he clings to power and his job and Beryl's just a shell, stripped, this cruel reminder of everything he should have had, time oozing around both of them like smog over the city. Still, he asks, "Who?"

Beryl blinks twice, lids sliding down to cover nothingness and then back up. She inhales and then shakes her head and Miles feels a twist of pained satisfaction somewhere below his ribs. Her confusion shudders across her face and her hand falls back to the bed. 

"No one," she finally answers and she doesn't sound like anyone Miles ever knew or anyone who should ever have existed.

Miles nods slowly, patronizing and he knows it's a good look on him, strong jaw, coldly gentle eyes and lips twisted in a smirk. "Of course." Metal pours down his throat, coating his stomach and the air smells like something rotting, old moss and decay on a forest floor. He tips his chin at Beryl and then at her hand, melted into a puddle on the sheet.

She flexes her fingers, leaving trails of grey and then closes her hand into a fist. She makes a small apologetic noise and Miles nods, watches her teeth press into the red flesh of her lip, tastes copper and salt.

  


**[i am the walrus]**

Miles is standing on a corner in London. Cars fly by on his left and three teenage boys are leaning against a building across the narrow street to his right. There's a fourth boy, a little apart, staring at something on the ground, intent like he's reading a sign no one else can see. Miles knows, of course, that that's exactly what the lad is doing and Miles wonders about himself, about his purpose. The boy's wearing jeans and leather, metal in his face that catches the dingy sunlight and makes it shine. Miles watches and wonders if he ever looked so new, if he made light shine like that.

Miles adjusts his coat and listens to the air around him, tuning out the cars. He needs a recruit, every cell needs five and he only has four. Again. Last time it was death and that was something he still thinks shouldn't have felt so new and sharp. This time, the girl just left, something about wanting a "normal life" and Miles can't decide if there's a difference, can't imagine turning off what he knows and pretending normalcy. 

The boy across the street looks up, glances at a motorcycle whizzing by with something like lust in his eyes and then turns sharply, looking to one of his friends expectantly. He heard something, Miles knows, but his friends aren't talking to him, passing a fag back and forth, pulling pollution into their lungs just like they've been doing all their lives. 

"It's in your head, boy," Miles says out loud to no one. He's not who the boy is listening to. Not yet. Miles isn't sure what the boy heard, not the exact phrase or even if it was made of words, although he can guess the message. "Mental illness is a side effect of the mission." 

Miles has at least fifteen witty and enigmatic answers if anyone asks him what the mission is. What surprises him most is that no one ever bothers.

The way the boy's head is cocked as he listens reminds Miles that he's here for a reason, not just out for a stroll and some philosophy, so he stands up a little straighter and takes one step closer to the street. A car drives by, too fast, and Miles feels a heavy sickness in his stomach. So many things no one can turn off and the boy across the street, Miles knows someone's already flicked his "on" switch, so there's no point in going back. He slides his palm quickly across the small white disc pinned to his lapel and remembers noise, soft whispers and Beryl's soft laughter fading into dense black static.

The boy turns his head again, looks right at Miles, challenging and there's something about him that Miles recognizes from years he can barely recall. He meets the boy's flashing eyes and nods, waiting for him to step into traffic and across to where Miles waits. Again.

  


**[strawberry fields forever]**

"Mr. Delacourt," the man in the wheelchair says before Miles is even completely in the room. "I was expecting you.

"Clearly." Miles stops in the threshold and surveys the room, warm oak and cold steel matching better than he thinks it should. "And it's actually 'Sir' Delacourt." The back of the man's head rises over his wheelchair, a bright dome blocking Miles' view of the sun on the other side of the window.

"Yes." There's a long pause and Miles can almost feel his mind being probed. "I knew that." The man doesn't turn around to greet him properly, though, just sits seemingly staring at the view. Miles knows that he's not really looking out though, but rather in.

Miles waits, feels a bit ill, but the slight pressing among his memories, around his identity, it's child's play compared to what he's had in there before. "I don't think you want to be doing that. Nasty stuff in there."

A sigh that feels like blue against Miles' cortex and leaves an impression like a wing through air. "I think I've seen my fair share of," a pause filled with polite distaste, "nastiness. Sir." 

Miles nods, giving a little ground. Some versions of genocide might qualify as unpleasant to someone like this, someone so tragically unaware of what the future holds. "Still." His voice is full of warning he doesn't truly mean. Why, after all, did he come here if not for this? And so he shrugs, his brain opening up to the ministrations. "But, if you insist."

Images flow, screams and murk, red mixing with brown, girls twisted in pain, sacrifices awash in moonlight, pain and fear and everything that Miles has known to be. All that he's learned over long years. Everything he is.

The wheelchair shudders a bit before it tips and Miles can feel it, can feel the man's shock and horror and the rush of fear slipping through his brain like fire through sand. It's nearly painful when it's gone, the slight adrenaline rush that Miles never experiences himself. But he blinks, recovers and looks up again to find the man sprawled awkwardly on the floor half in and half out of his chair, the sunset shattering the sky behind him.

"I did warn you, Professor," Miles says, his voice buttery and even. The man looks up at him, eyes wide. Miles can imagine all the things the man wants to say but can't get past his own terror. "Yes, yes. It's all very shocking at first. I was like you, too, once." Truthfully, Miles barely remembers those days and wouldn't want to if he could, but the still all too human types seem to need words like this.

Finally the professor gets the will to speak, "What do you want?" His voice is weak, but not yet broken. Miles intends to fix that.

"Professor Xavier, I want you to be part of the future. You have quite an organization here at this school. We have a lot that we'd like to teach your students." Miles curls his lips into a shape he no longer has a name for and watches the body on the floor twitch as Miles slowly pulls Xavier back into his mind.

  


**[all you need is love]**

The boy is stupid. Miles knew that all along. Stupid to think he could stop the coming of the Archon, stupid to trust someone like that punk and his common friends to defeat years of planning and power. Of course, what was truly stupid was to want to stop it in the first place. Miles doesn't know what he's doing anymore, hasn't since that boy showed up and gave him back something he never deserved ( _never really had_ ), but he knows that resistance is not worth his time. Mr. Dreams made that clear and Miles understands now, can see that all this time he himself has been resisting for no reason. 

He thought it was about knowledge, learning everything before it was time to change, but now he understands that the only way to know is to be made like them. Go along to get along, his mother always said and Miles knows now the wisdom there. The boy though, blond and too full of contradictions and unrealized wanting, he maybe cares too much. Miles heart beats faster ( _soft, oozing red and cold inside his chest_ ) and he thinks maybe he knew that feeling once. He's sure he's glad to be rid of it.

Miles watches the boy, knows that everything about this day is too important. He doesn't care and he doesn't want, but he was raised right, he's the most powerful man ( _not that that means much when men are nothing more than scum, the voice in his ear reminds_ ) in all of Britain, perhaps the world and no teenager is going to destroy his plans. Even if they're not his plans, Miles thinks ( _the voice's, never miles'_ ), looking around at the people gathered there. He hasn't been in control of anything since those drugs and that pain and he manages to hold onto this tiny part of himself ( _miles to go_ that hovers just behind his eyes, floating above the letters and the antiseptic smell and the constant noise and that part. That part remembers his mother's soft clipped accent and the scent of rosewater and even if he knows now that that part's just a lie and a sickness, that part still has a desire to get things right ( _right and then over, no more holding letters that spell m-i-l-e-s_ ). 

So the boy thought he could just take this on-- the Invisibles ( _spits the name, short sharp wet word flying across his thoughts_ ) had him convinced that he was enough, that he was something like the messiah and Miles can't help but scoff. The man next to him ( _a hiss, traitor, blurring memory_ ) turns, raises an eyebrow and glares. Miles ignores the look, wondering instead what color blood would pour down his face if he could just slice the top of his head away ( _no need, soon enough_ ). He thinks that peace and pain both start with the same letter and if he focuses just right he could make them the same. Miles wonders if the boy's teacher is learning how peace and pain merge in the cipher chambers ( _no king now but one_ ).

The Archon descends and the boy is held still, quaking, but swearing even now ( _bloody and hell and nothing but_ ). There's only silence, every guest holding their breath, the ceremony's songs long over and even the sound of bones being split has quieted for this moment. 

If the boy has any plan left, it will not work. He knows and Miles knows, the look of defeat on his tanned face like a song and things are slipping away even before it starts. The man whose name is Miles can't see, but he doesn't want to anyway, so he just stares forward, watching nothing, counting, making futile plans for any possibility. Then the boy is gone and the King is there, is him, is filling the room with a vile over-powering emptiness and there's nothing left to know ( _know-nothing, no-miles_ ).


End file.
